Pages

Thursday, March 6, 2014

CIDER BROOK by Carla Neggers: EXCERPT

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR CARLA NEGGERS DELVES
INTO A 300-YEAR-OLD MYSTERY LURKING IN A NEW ENGLAND CIDER MILL

Being rescued by a good-looking, bad-boy
firefighter isn’t how Samantha Bennett expected to start her stay in Knights
Bridge, Massachusetts. Now she has everyone’s attention –especially that of
Justin Sloan, her rescuer, who wants to know why she was camped out in an
abandoned old New England cider mill.

Samantha is a treasure hunter who has
returned to Knights Bridge to solve a 300-year-old mystery and salvage her good
name. Justin remembers her well. He’s the one who alerted her late mentor to
her iffy past and got her fired. But just because he doesn’t trust her doesn’t
mean he can resist her. Samantha is daring, determined, seized by wanderlust
–everything that strong, stoic Justin never knew he wanted. Until now…

New York Times bestselling
author Carla Neggers’ books have been called “riveting,” “magical” and
“stunningly effective.” Now she returns to the lush Swift River Valley with the
irresistible story of one woman’s quest for treasure and redemption.

Samantha Bennett slipped her grandfather’s antique silver
flask into an outer pocket of her khaki safari jacket. He’d claimed the flask
was from an old pirate chest, but she’d discovered in the three years since his
death at ninety-six that not everything he’d told her had been factual. Harry
Bennett had been a grand spinner of the strategic tall tale. He’d probably been
drinking run from the flask when he’d spun the pirate-chest story.

No
rum for me, Samantha thought, glancing around her grandfather’s cluttered
office on the second floor of the Bennett house in Boston’s Back Bay. She’d
filled the flask with the smoky Scotch he had left in one of his crystal
decanters. If she was going to hunt pirate’s treasure, she figured she ought to
have whiskey with her.

Although what could go wrong in little Knights Bridge,
Massachusetts?

Her
grandfather smiled at her from a framed black-and-white photograph hanging on
the wood-paneled wall behind his massive oak desk. At the time of the photo,
he’d been forty-seven roguishly handsome wearing a jacket much like hers. He’d
just arrived back in Boston after the Antarctic trip that had sealed his
reputation as a world-class explorer and adventurer. It had almost killed him,
too. Her couple of nights’ camping in an out-of-the-way New England town hardly
compared to an expedition to Antarctica.

She
buttoned the flap of her jacket pocket. There were endless pockets inside and
out. She was already forgetting where she’d put things—her phone, compass,
matches, map, the earth-tone lipstick she’d grabbed at the last second, in case
she went out to dinner one night during her stay in Knights Bridge.

Out to dinner? Where,
with whom—and why?

If
nothing else, a few days away from her grandfather’s clutter would do her good.
He had been born on a struggling New England farm and had died a wealthy man,
if also a hopeless pack rat. Samantha hadn’t realized just how much he’d
collected in his long, active life until she’d been hired by his estate—meaning
her father and her uncle—to go through his house and his Londom apartment. She
swore she’d found fum wrappers from 1952. The man had saved everything.

The
morning sun streamed through translucent panels that hung over bowfront windows
framed by heavy charcoal velvet drapes. Her grandmother, who had died
twenty-five years ago, when Samantha was four, had decorated the entire house
herself, decreeing that gray and white were the perfect colors for this room,
for when her husband was there, being contemplative and studious—which wasn’t
often, even in his later years. He’d spent little time in his office, mostly
just long enough to stack up his latest finds.

Samantha appreciated the effect of the filtered sunlight on
the original oil painting that she’d unearthed from the office closet a few
weeks ago. The painting was unsigned and clearly an amateur work, but it had
captivated her from the moment she’d taken it out into the light. It depicted
an idyllic red-painted New England cider mill, with apples in wooden
crates, barrels of cider and a water wheel capturing the runoff from a small
stone-and-earth dam on a woodland stream. She’d assumed it was untitled but two
days ago had discovered neat, faded handwriting on the lower edge of the simple
wood frame.

The Mill at Cider
Brook.

Her surprise had been so complete that she’d dipped into the
Scotch decanter.

She didn’t
know if the mill depicted in the painting was real, but there was a Cider Brook
in Knights Bridge, barely two hours west of Boston.

Of all places.

A quick internet search had produced a year-old notice that
the town of Knights Bridge was selling an old cider mill in its possession. Had
someone bought it? Was it still for sale?

Samantha had checked the closet for anything else her
grandfather might have stuffed in there related to Cider Brook. Instead, she
discovered a legal-size envelope containing about fifty yellowed, handwritten
pages—the rough draft of a story called The
Adventures of Captain Farraday and Lady Elizabeth.

She suspected but had no way to prove that the story was by
the same hand as the painting, but it didn’t matter. It had sealed the deal,
and now she had Harry Bennett’s antique silver flask tucked in her jacket and
her plans made for her return to Knights Bridge—a town she had expected, and
hoped, she would never have to visit again.

Carla Neggers has been spinning stories ever since she
climbed a tree with pad and pen at age 11. Now she has millions of copies of
her books in print in more than 30 countries, and more than two dozen of her
books have placed on the New York Times, USA Today and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. Cider
Brook is the third novel in her acclaimed Swift River Valley romantic
mystery series that launched with Secrets of the Lost Summer and That
Night on Thistle Lane. Secrets of the Lost Summer spent four weeks
on the New York Times bestseller list and garnered rave reviews,
including a starred review from Booklist and a Top Pick from RT Book
Reviews. Growing up in rural western Massachusetts with three brothers and
three sisters, Carla developed an eye for detail and a love of a good story.
Her imagination, curiosity and sense of adventure are key to creating the
complex relationships, fast-paced plots and deep sense of place in her books.

No comments:

Post a Comment

About Me

Mother of two amazing kids, Miss A™ entertainment columnist, avid reader bordering book-fetishism. Books are my childhood friends, my stress-relief therapy, my wings to fly to faraway lands and distant times, my source of knowledge and inspiration. I simply adore them and consume them aplenty. My "book love affair" began in my early teens with the Bronte sisters, Dickens, Austen, Poe, Conrad, and James. My taste in reading was shaped by those masters and still today, when I read fiction, I appreciate the dark tones, the Gothic touches, and the psychological insight typical of those classics.